Cafe Yumm is knocked off!

I'm a stud....well to put it more humbly, I'm proud of myself right now. : ) That's better. I didn't rob Cafe Yumm....literally.....just sorta......I was just being proactive about my situation.....someone else started it. A total stranger, ripped off their Yumm Sauce recipe, posted it on their blog, I found it, and have since used it to my advantage. That's all. : )

Recently, I finally convinced Chad to go to Cafe Yumm with me. It was quite a feat considering it's vegetarian food and he's a complete guy's guy. But Cafe Yumm is very mainstream for vegesaurus food, which is probably why they are popping up everywhere like the spiders near my front door. Don't ask me how many spiderwebs Chad has run into while walking from the garage to our front door.....tehe....at least I think it's funny. Anyway, back to the Yumm story. For him, vegetarian food = hippie food, or weird chic food. I once tried to get him into Laughing Planet Cafe, yeah right! Once he saw there was no meat on the menu and half the customers had dreadlocks and exposed, hairy armpits, he begged to leave. So, you can now understand why it has taken me a few years to get Chad into Cafe Yumm.

For any who don't know, Cafe Yumm specializes in "Yumm bowls" which feature, rice, beans, and Yummy sauce, with toppings (diced tomato, avocado slices, olives, shredded cheese, and sour cream), all served warm. Yumm+MMmmmmmmmm. And Chad concurred!!!! Ha! When we were done, we wanted more. Chad said, "I bet we could make this at home." I said, "I know....we just need the recipe for the sauce and the rest would be as easy as falling asleep in Sacrement Meeting on High Council Sunday....JK......my dad-in-law just got called to the High Council so I had to put a wise-crack in.

Well, I did it. I can make a Yumm bowl from scratch, and I mean, SCRATCH scratch. The best part is that the main ingredients are rice and beans.....hello....perfect for food storage and super cheap, and tasty, and easy, and the list goes on.

First I found the sauce knock-off recipe online. It had some funky stuff in it, but it turned out great. Among the ingredients were garbonzo beans, and soybeans. The first time I used canned garbonzos and silken tofu....but I knew I could get the recipe to be much cheaper by using dry beans, and cooking them myself.

Armed with the internet and my cooking skills I bought dry beans in bulk from WinCo, dirt cheap man. I had NO IDEA how to make my black beans go from dry, to the kind in the can. I knew they had to be soaked, and I thought that was it. So I soaked them overnight. When I sampled them in the morning, they were chewable, but not like normal beans....eeek. So I soaked them another night....lol....how embarrassing. (oh yeah, one of the tubs overfilled onto the counter because I didn't know how much the beans expanded) The next day, they tasted exactly the same. But luckily the internet rescued me, and taught me that I have to cook them.....oh dear.....that should have been obvious. I cooked them in some water for an hour on the stove, and my beans were like canned beans, but cheaper! So now, I can make Yumm bowls with my beans from food storage.

So, Cafe Yumm, I regret to inform you that I will no longer be your customer, but I will always admire your modern dining areas, and your ability to make "hippie-food" popular among the masses.